Long Beach's buried cemetery

A BURIED BURIAL PLACE: Jennie Aguillar was born in Mexico in 1890. She died 30 years later in Long Beach, where she lived with her husband Joe at Wilton Street at Termino Avenue. She was buried at Palm Cemetery in Long Beach.

Thomas L. McGregor, the infant son of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas A. McGregor of 1121 Gladys Ave., died on March 19, 1920. The baby was buried at Palm Cemetery.

Luria Nieto, the 14-year-old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Trinidad Nieto, died on May 11, 1920. There was a small obituary in the Long Beach Press. She was buried at Palm Cemetery.

James J. Taylor died Aug. 4, 1918, at Seaside Hospital in Long Beach. According to the Long Beach Press, Taylor had been found ill and destitute in a shack at Alamitos Bay. He lived on donations he received for his sand sculptures, most of which were renderings of a mother and child, which he called "Cast Up By the Sea." He was buried at Palm Cemetery.

Palm Cemetery, in turn, was buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery-Sunnyside Mausoleum, at Cherry Avenue and San Antonio Drive, in Long Beach.

Claudine Burnett, the Long Beach historian, librarian, researcher and author, has devoted much of her career to making our life easier. At the Long Beach Public Library, she performed the massive task of going through hundreds of reels of microfilm to index the Long Beach newspapers going back to the 19th century.

For that alone, we would permit her to take a nice and overly earned retirement. But, lately, she's jumped back into the archives to go through the old newspapers' obituaries and posting the resting places for the town's notables and unknowns on the website Find a Grave (www.findagrave.com).

"I started coming upon Palm Cemetery, which I'd never heard of," she said.

Nor had we. You've got your Sunnyside and Municipal cemeteries side-by-side on Willow Street, and you've got your All Souls and Forest Lawn-Sunnyside across from each other on Cherry Avenue. Never heard of Palm.

Neither had the people in the Forest Lawn corporate offices, nor the people at the Long Beach site, save for an old groundskeeper, who pointed out the Palm site to Burnett in the area in a courtyard in front of the mausoleum.

There are no headstones extant; no hint of a graveyard buried at the cemetery.

The earliest references Burnett found to Palm were in 1918, but it could be older. She says Jotham Bixby, one of the city's founding fathers, had donated the land for some of the poorer citizens of the young town.

Anyone could come to bury their relatives at no cost. Many of the graves had plain markers; some had none.

We talked to a corporate vice president about Palm and, while he hadn't heard of it, he did some, as we say, digging, and found that it did in fact exist.

The groundskeeper told Burnett that the courtyard will be redesigned soon and that there are plans to put up a marker to acknowledge the existence of the old and forgotten Palm.

"It makes sense that the courtyard was the old Palm," says Burnett. "The mausoleum was built in 1923 and they built it around Palm, so they must have know it was there."

It's anybody's guess, however, why there is no evidence of anyone being buried there - though a cynic, or maybe even a realist, might imagine it has something to do with the fact that no one paid for the burials.

Until some sort of acknowledgment is made of the forgotten people buried there, they are at least memorialized on the Web, thanks to Burnett's efforts.